By the time
that Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) received the Nobel Prize
in 1976, the world was beginning to acknowledge that he
was among the greatest of the modernist poets, author of
a poetic canon that spanned much of the twentieth century.
Profoundly rooted in the Italian landscape and culture
and with an enormous sensitivity to his language and its
heritage, Montale shaped poems throughout his life that
were mysterious, resonant, and layered with meanings. His
poems range from daily life through history and myth, and
on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love
poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim, he has
few equals.

This volume, which draws on the entire corpus of Montale's
work, brings together three of his most experienced and
effective translators.

SUMMER

The falcon's cross-shaped shadow's scarcely known
to the young shrubs it grazes.
And what does the cloud see? Multiple faces
that form in the brimming wellspring.

Maybe you come back to me, dead girl,
Arethusa, at my feet,
in the silver wriggle of the trout
swimming against the current.

Here's the sunburned shoulder, here's the gold
nugget, upturned in the sun,
the crazy cabbage moth, the thin
spider's thread across the boiling foam--

some things manage to make it through
the needle's eye, but most do not . . .

Too many lives go into the making of just one.

--Eugenio Montale
translated by David Young

Translation copyright c 2004 by David Young. May
not be reproduced without permission.